Well Damn It
Sep. 7th, 2023 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickI got caught up in watching YouTube stuff and realized too late I'd missed the 10:04 for today. *grumbles* I know I'm not a "all-consuming passion" Backie anymore, but I still like to do a little something for the important dates on the BTTF calendar! Ah well -- I suppose so long as I don't miss The Big One (November 12th), it'll be all right. Meh.
Still, I have an update to do, even if it is late, so here we are --
Work – A little better than yesterday – traffic going IN was horrible (lot of accidents clogging things up everywhere), but my coworkers were much quieter (helped by one of them having a lunchtime doctor’s appointment) and I was able to concentrate on my duplicates and some credit card calls. And then the ride home was pretty smooth, at least partially thanks to the fact that a lot of schools around here either closed early or closed entirely because of the heat. I’ll take it!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure Presents Blades In The Dark – “Magic, Ghosts, Danger And Death!” We left it off with Baranby somehow trying to figure out how he could Sway a pair of oscillantronic nose clippers into their inventor’s nostrils and up into his brain so he could use his Rook’s Gambit ability – Andy and Ellen began suggesting cool lines he could throw at the unfortunate Morvin to get him to turn around and give Barnaby a clear shot at his nose. Barnaby eventually went with, essentially, “well, you don’t want to die with all that horrible gaudy nose hair, do you?” and rolled his three dice –
Two ones and a SIX! Morvin, annoyed, turned to him declaring that he didn’t want to die at ALL – and up the clippers went, boring through soft flesh and shooting little bits of brain down the chute. On the plus side, proof positive those clippers work VERY well. XD Barnaby said, “well, I DID warn them not to try any funny business! I even defined it for them!” to the cowering scientists (who very much did NOT need to be persuaded not to fight back), and then he, Lilith, Kasmir, Kelly, and Eleanor legged it in the direction of the gunshots. A few opened doors later, they were reunited with Edvard and Zillah in the Turbine Hallway. Barnaby, Lilith, and Kasimir brought them up to speed (basically, couple of people dead, cover pretty well blown at this point), and Edvard decided they needed to get to the Barricade with all possible haste. Fortunately, they had Kelly with them, who knew the way – she led them down some twisting corridors before stopping at a door, explaining that beyond was the room where they kept all the Barricade’s spare parts, with the actual machine beyond that. Her hope was that maybe they could build something with the parts to sabotage the Barricade –
But when she led them all into the room, they found it completely empty. And then, moments later, an aperture in the floor opened, spitting out the head of the original Wonderful Mechanical Man –
Welded onto an absolutely GINORMOUS mech suit, driven by one Amadeus Astor himself! He declared that he would not be the weak link that allowed the Barricade to fall, and gave the team one last chance to surrender. Edvard was like, “No, I don’t want to do that, I want to beat and humiliate you instead” – Astor was like “so be it” and began using the Worrisome Maniacal Mech (as it was named) to spray blazing leviathan distillate everywhere from a giant flamethrower arm. What do? Well, Lilith immediately went to using her new Tempest power to hit it with lightning; Kasimir pulled out some grappling hooks with ropes attached, with the intent of slinging one at the Worrisome Maniacal Mech’s legs and doing that thing where you run around the legs with a rope to tie them up – Zillah was like “I want in” and took the other grappling hook to do the same thing from the other direction; Edvard called for a flashback to establish that, after having devoured the book Frankenstein (or at least the local Volisport equivalent) while making the original WMM, he decided a killswitch to stop it turning on him would be a good idea, meaning that there was a switch in the WMM’s head that, if he could reach it, would shut the whole thing down –
And Barnaby called for a flashback where he established that one of the various companies under his control had gotten the bid to rebuild Astor Headquarters – and that he’d convinced them to put 100% lead pipes in. Meaning Astor was now BADLY suffering the effects of lead poisoning. XD Luke allowed this because, well, that mech clearly was NOT made by a sound mind! He insisted anyone doing anything active in this moment roll a group action, which Kasimir agreed to lead (as he still had stress to burn) as a Finesse roll. So Lilith, Kasimir, Zillah, and in a surprise twist Barnaby all rolled –
And while poor Kasimir got a two, EVERYONE ELSE GOT SIXES! :D Meaning that Kasimir and Zillah were able to easily get their hooks into the Worrisome Maniacal Mech’s legs and tangle them up with their ropes, and Lilith was able to cast her Tempest and summon a huge fuck-off bolt of lightning that ended up completely severing the flamethrower arm once it hit. And she didn’t even have to sacrifice herself to the spray of flaming distillate to do it, because Barnaby shoved her out of the way once she was done casting, in the one actively heroic thing he’s done all season. He promptly warned her not to get used to it, as he was only willing to do it because his coat was already ruined. XD And then one of Lilith’s little snake hairs popped out, and he got distracted by wondering what the hell was in his drink (because of course he had a drink). XD Astor, furious, attempted to retaliate by firing a net gun out of his other arm at Zillah and Kasimir – however, Zillah was able to successfully leap on the arm and wrassle it as it aimed up, and was able to deflect the net so that it hit Eleanor and Kelly (who were staying out of it because they’d looked to Kasimir for guidance, and all he’d been able to tell them was “hit the glowing spots for massive damage,” which they both agreed was a bad plan) instead. Kasimir used the opportunity to do a cool, if probably agonizing, knee slide through the bound legs, slapping some explosive putty on a knee joint, then flipping over (knee brace sparking awesomely against the floor) and exploding it with the electroplasmic shot from his cane. The resultant collapse allowed Edvard his shot at the head, and he rolled a six to get up there and hit the killswitch, causing the entire mech to shut down. Astor yanked himself out of the broken hunk of metal and collapsed to his knees in front of Edvard, reluctantly admitting he’d been humbled and bested.
Edvard was like “you sure have!” and promptly yanked out a camera of his own design so someone could take a picture. XD Kasimir freed Eleanor and Kelly, with the former running up to Astor and demanding he tell them where the Barricade was and how to shut it down (nearly ruining the picture) Astor revealed that he did indeed have the key to the next room where the Barricade was housed on him, but he first had to appeal to their reason. He pointed out to Edvard that shutting down the Barricade would render all his oscillantronic inventions useless, and to Lilith that creating a world without ghosts would put her ghost-hunter family out of business! Barnaby, he tried to convince by pointing out just how much he benefited from the status quo, and Kasimir he tried to wheedle into “stealing the city” by allowing them to help him run the Barricade and change the system from within. What did they all say?
Edvard’s response was essentially “I don’t build the inventions because I just want to BUILD THINGS, I want to help people, and I’ve come around on the whole ‘ghosts trapped inside of our technology is bad’ idea and want to try something new in the new world we’ll be making;” Lilith’s “my family will be FINE, we can be historians and study the new magical effects that will be happening, and also you KNOW what you did was wrong because you constantly refer to what initially happened as the ghost CALAMITY;” Kasimir’s “if I steal the whole city there’s nothing left to steal, so I’ve put myself out of a job;” and Barnaby’s – well, “actually, I agree with you, I don’t want the peasants randomly getting power they haven’t ‘earned’ by being born into it, but there’s no arguing with this lot and I’m frankly far too lazy to do so.” XD And THEN Kasimir pointed out that Astor hadn’t done Zillah, forcing Astor to start trying to ramble on about her family and how they might suffer in the new world – Zillah didn’t even really get a chance to react before Edvard was like “he’s stalling for time, I’m getting the key off him.” XD And so the key was retrieved, and handed over to Eleanor, who, like a good boss, insisted that they all make sure that shutting off the Barricade was what they wanted. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow in the final ten minutes – last chance to turn turncoat, Barnaby! XD
2. Continue writing Valicer In The Dark “Home Sweet Lair”: Check – the sight of the stained-glass-canopied four-poster bed in the old bedroom ended up triggering a discussion about Victor’s parents, with Victor admitting that while he’ll never say he didn’t grow up in luxury, he never really felt like his parents were there, you know? Especially his mother, who was always chasing after status in her quest to be seen as just as good as the nobility. Couple that with not having any friends his own age, and – yeah, he was rather lonely growing up. Alice and Smiler offered their sympathies, because it IS rather sad. Fortunately, going into the next room provided Victor a distraction in the form of a Harper upright piano that he immediately wanted to try and salvage. XD What can I say, dude loves his pianos! And while Alice isn’t particularly musical, he’s going to find at least a bit of kinship in Smiler with their noodling on the guitar and drums. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check plus – though, as stated above, getting to these late in the day is what cost me my 10:04 PM update stamp. *grumbles* Still, I got through both the Subs video for the day and a bonus video, which is good –
A) First up, from OXBox, we had “7 Epically Long Boss Fights That Ruined Your Evening Plans!” Mike, Jane, and Andy talking about those boss fights that are a little bit TOO epic if you were planning on doing anything else that day. And while they stated they were trying not to pick on the series, Final Fantasy showed up on this list no less than three times with three different games! Basically, If you’re playing FFXVI, FFXV, and FFXXI at the same time for some reason, make sure you have the entire day free for Yiazmat (he of 50 million HP), Adamantoise (a mountain-sized turtle that you have to whittle down very very slowly), and Absolute Virtue (the boss fight that can heal itself on the regular, and that the devs had to NERF and impose a two-hour time limit on so people could actually beat it). Hilariously, though, the longest boss fight on the list is also, if you do it right, the easiest – because you can go sniper-to-sniper against The End in Metal Gear 3 for a good couple of hours, or you can get near him, save your game, wait a real-life week, and reload to find the guy’s died of old age. XD The choice is yours! Me, I’m gonna stick to reasonably-lengthed boss fights, thanks. :p
B) And second up, from Josh Way, we had “SCREEN TIME: RPG and Me!” Josh briefly talking about his relationship with the RPG genre of games – basically, he was deeply intimidated by them at first as he though they’d be too “mathy” for him (he’s very much NOT interested in the dice rolls of traditional tabletop RPGS), but then he discovered the “action RPG” (games with RPG elements but real-time-action combat), which led him into purer examples of CRPGs, and now he is a fan! He thinks that maybe part of the problem is the name – that calling something an RPG puts an expectation on someone that you’ll be inhabiting a role and doing lots of complicated stuff with numbers and whatnot, when in reality his personal experience is “you less inhabit these blank slate characters and more change their traits in response to what parts of the gameplay loop you enjoy.” Which, you know what, fair. XD But yeah, he just wanted to be a friendly face toward those who are ALSO intimidated by those kinds of games, like he was, and assure them that it is, in the end, all in silly fun. So that’s nice. :)
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, booyah –
Victor Luvs Alice – Did this first thing after supper – after confirming once and for all I’d never posted Ludo’s “Love Me Dead” previously on this blog, I made the Song Sunday post for it commemorating it as the first named song I could find that I explicitly said reminded me of Valice (specifically, the “Beyond The Rift” versions I was thinking of making at the time, who eventually became “deadgirlsliekme” and “save_us_alice”) and slapped it in the queue for the 10th! So that’s another Valice(r) Calendar date taken care of, yay.
Valice Multiverse – Just the one ask reply today, about how directions technically change depending on which way you’re facing. XD I get some weird ones over there sometimes – at least this is a fun weird one!
*nods* Not too shabby. And now it is time to head to bed because I am TIRED. Getting to sleep at a decent time has been a bit of a problem lately, and having to have the AC on to sleep comfortably is not helping. *grumbles* At least the heat is supposed to be a little less tomorrow, and finally break over the weekend. Now we just have to hope Hurricane Lee in the Atlantic takes one of the paths that misses us. . .keep your fingers crossed! Night all!
Still, I have an update to do, even if it is late, so here we are --
Work – A little better than yesterday – traffic going IN was horrible (lot of accidents clogging things up everywhere), but my coworkers were much quieter (helped by one of them having a lunchtime doctor’s appointment) and I was able to concentrate on my duplicates and some credit card calls. And then the ride home was pretty smooth, at least partially thanks to the fact that a lot of schools around here either closed early or closed entirely because of the heat. I’ll take it!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure Presents Blades In The Dark – “Magic, Ghosts, Danger And Death!” We left it off with Baranby somehow trying to figure out how he could Sway a pair of oscillantronic nose clippers into their inventor’s nostrils and up into his brain so he could use his Rook’s Gambit ability – Andy and Ellen began suggesting cool lines he could throw at the unfortunate Morvin to get him to turn around and give Barnaby a clear shot at his nose. Barnaby eventually went with, essentially, “well, you don’t want to die with all that horrible gaudy nose hair, do you?” and rolled his three dice –
Two ones and a SIX! Morvin, annoyed, turned to him declaring that he didn’t want to die at ALL – and up the clippers went, boring through soft flesh and shooting little bits of brain down the chute. On the plus side, proof positive those clippers work VERY well. XD Barnaby said, “well, I DID warn them not to try any funny business! I even defined it for them!” to the cowering scientists (who very much did NOT need to be persuaded not to fight back), and then he, Lilith, Kasmir, Kelly, and Eleanor legged it in the direction of the gunshots. A few opened doors later, they were reunited with Edvard and Zillah in the Turbine Hallway. Barnaby, Lilith, and Kasimir brought them up to speed (basically, couple of people dead, cover pretty well blown at this point), and Edvard decided they needed to get to the Barricade with all possible haste. Fortunately, they had Kelly with them, who knew the way – she led them down some twisting corridors before stopping at a door, explaining that beyond was the room where they kept all the Barricade’s spare parts, with the actual machine beyond that. Her hope was that maybe they could build something with the parts to sabotage the Barricade –
But when she led them all into the room, they found it completely empty. And then, moments later, an aperture in the floor opened, spitting out the head of the original Wonderful Mechanical Man –
Welded onto an absolutely GINORMOUS mech suit, driven by one Amadeus Astor himself! He declared that he would not be the weak link that allowed the Barricade to fall, and gave the team one last chance to surrender. Edvard was like, “No, I don’t want to do that, I want to beat and humiliate you instead” – Astor was like “so be it” and began using the Worrisome Maniacal Mech (as it was named) to spray blazing leviathan distillate everywhere from a giant flamethrower arm. What do? Well, Lilith immediately went to using her new Tempest power to hit it with lightning; Kasimir pulled out some grappling hooks with ropes attached, with the intent of slinging one at the Worrisome Maniacal Mech’s legs and doing that thing where you run around the legs with a rope to tie them up – Zillah was like “I want in” and took the other grappling hook to do the same thing from the other direction; Edvard called for a flashback to establish that, after having devoured the book Frankenstein (or at least the local Volisport equivalent) while making the original WMM, he decided a killswitch to stop it turning on him would be a good idea, meaning that there was a switch in the WMM’s head that, if he could reach it, would shut the whole thing down –
And Barnaby called for a flashback where he established that one of the various companies under his control had gotten the bid to rebuild Astor Headquarters – and that he’d convinced them to put 100% lead pipes in. Meaning Astor was now BADLY suffering the effects of lead poisoning. XD Luke allowed this because, well, that mech clearly was NOT made by a sound mind! He insisted anyone doing anything active in this moment roll a group action, which Kasimir agreed to lead (as he still had stress to burn) as a Finesse roll. So Lilith, Kasimir, Zillah, and in a surprise twist Barnaby all rolled –
And while poor Kasimir got a two, EVERYONE ELSE GOT SIXES! :D Meaning that Kasimir and Zillah were able to easily get their hooks into the Worrisome Maniacal Mech’s legs and tangle them up with their ropes, and Lilith was able to cast her Tempest and summon a huge fuck-off bolt of lightning that ended up completely severing the flamethrower arm once it hit. And she didn’t even have to sacrifice herself to the spray of flaming distillate to do it, because Barnaby shoved her out of the way once she was done casting, in the one actively heroic thing he’s done all season. He promptly warned her not to get used to it, as he was only willing to do it because his coat was already ruined. XD And then one of Lilith’s little snake hairs popped out, and he got distracted by wondering what the hell was in his drink (because of course he had a drink). XD Astor, furious, attempted to retaliate by firing a net gun out of his other arm at Zillah and Kasimir – however, Zillah was able to successfully leap on the arm and wrassle it as it aimed up, and was able to deflect the net so that it hit Eleanor and Kelly (who were staying out of it because they’d looked to Kasimir for guidance, and all he’d been able to tell them was “hit the glowing spots for massive damage,” which they both agreed was a bad plan) instead. Kasimir used the opportunity to do a cool, if probably agonizing, knee slide through the bound legs, slapping some explosive putty on a knee joint, then flipping over (knee brace sparking awesomely against the floor) and exploding it with the electroplasmic shot from his cane. The resultant collapse allowed Edvard his shot at the head, and he rolled a six to get up there and hit the killswitch, causing the entire mech to shut down. Astor yanked himself out of the broken hunk of metal and collapsed to his knees in front of Edvard, reluctantly admitting he’d been humbled and bested.
Edvard was like “you sure have!” and promptly yanked out a camera of his own design so someone could take a picture. XD Kasimir freed Eleanor and Kelly, with the former running up to Astor and demanding he tell them where the Barricade was and how to shut it down (nearly ruining the picture) Astor revealed that he did indeed have the key to the next room where the Barricade was housed on him, but he first had to appeal to their reason. He pointed out to Edvard that shutting down the Barricade would render all his oscillantronic inventions useless, and to Lilith that creating a world without ghosts would put her ghost-hunter family out of business! Barnaby, he tried to convince by pointing out just how much he benefited from the status quo, and Kasimir he tried to wheedle into “stealing the city” by allowing them to help him run the Barricade and change the system from within. What did they all say?
Edvard’s response was essentially “I don’t build the inventions because I just want to BUILD THINGS, I want to help people, and I’ve come around on the whole ‘ghosts trapped inside of our technology is bad’ idea and want to try something new in the new world we’ll be making;” Lilith’s “my family will be FINE, we can be historians and study the new magical effects that will be happening, and also you KNOW what you did was wrong because you constantly refer to what initially happened as the ghost CALAMITY;” Kasimir’s “if I steal the whole city there’s nothing left to steal, so I’ve put myself out of a job;” and Barnaby’s – well, “actually, I agree with you, I don’t want the peasants randomly getting power they haven’t ‘earned’ by being born into it, but there’s no arguing with this lot and I’m frankly far too lazy to do so.” XD And THEN Kasimir pointed out that Astor hadn’t done Zillah, forcing Astor to start trying to ramble on about her family and how they might suffer in the new world – Zillah didn’t even really get a chance to react before Edvard was like “he’s stalling for time, I’m getting the key off him.” XD And so the key was retrieved, and handed over to Eleanor, who, like a good boss, insisted that they all make sure that shutting off the Barricade was what they wanted. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow in the final ten minutes – last chance to turn turncoat, Barnaby! XD
2. Continue writing Valicer In The Dark “Home Sweet Lair”: Check – the sight of the stained-glass-canopied four-poster bed in the old bedroom ended up triggering a discussion about Victor’s parents, with Victor admitting that while he’ll never say he didn’t grow up in luxury, he never really felt like his parents were there, you know? Especially his mother, who was always chasing after status in her quest to be seen as just as good as the nobility. Couple that with not having any friends his own age, and – yeah, he was rather lonely growing up. Alice and Smiler offered their sympathies, because it IS rather sad. Fortunately, going into the next room provided Victor a distraction in the form of a Harper upright piano that he immediately wanted to try and salvage. XD What can I say, dude loves his pianos! And while Alice isn’t particularly musical, he’s going to find at least a bit of kinship in Smiler with their noodling on the guitar and drums. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check plus – though, as stated above, getting to these late in the day is what cost me my 10:04 PM update stamp. *grumbles* Still, I got through both the Subs video for the day and a bonus video, which is good –
A) First up, from OXBox, we had “7 Epically Long Boss Fights That Ruined Your Evening Plans!” Mike, Jane, and Andy talking about those boss fights that are a little bit TOO epic if you were planning on doing anything else that day. And while they stated they were trying not to pick on the series, Final Fantasy showed up on this list no less than three times with three different games! Basically, If you’re playing FFXVI, FFXV, and FFXXI at the same time for some reason, make sure you have the entire day free for Yiazmat (he of 50 million HP), Adamantoise (a mountain-sized turtle that you have to whittle down very very slowly), and Absolute Virtue (the boss fight that can heal itself on the regular, and that the devs had to NERF and impose a two-hour time limit on so people could actually beat it). Hilariously, though, the longest boss fight on the list is also, if you do it right, the easiest – because you can go sniper-to-sniper against The End in Metal Gear 3 for a good couple of hours, or you can get near him, save your game, wait a real-life week, and reload to find the guy’s died of old age. XD The choice is yours! Me, I’m gonna stick to reasonably-lengthed boss fights, thanks. :p
B) And second up, from Josh Way, we had “SCREEN TIME: RPG and Me!” Josh briefly talking about his relationship with the RPG genre of games – basically, he was deeply intimidated by them at first as he though they’d be too “mathy” for him (he’s very much NOT interested in the dice rolls of traditional tabletop RPGS), but then he discovered the “action RPG” (games with RPG elements but real-time-action combat), which led him into purer examples of CRPGs, and now he is a fan! He thinks that maybe part of the problem is the name – that calling something an RPG puts an expectation on someone that you’ll be inhabiting a role and doing lots of complicated stuff with numbers and whatnot, when in reality his personal experience is “you less inhabit these blank slate characters and more change their traits in response to what parts of the gameplay loop you enjoy.” Which, you know what, fair. XD But yeah, he just wanted to be a friendly face toward those who are ALSO intimidated by those kinds of games, like he was, and assure them that it is, in the end, all in silly fun. So that’s nice. :)
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, booyah –
Victor Luvs Alice – Did this first thing after supper – after confirming once and for all I’d never posted Ludo’s “Love Me Dead” previously on this blog, I made the Song Sunday post for it commemorating it as the first named song I could find that I explicitly said reminded me of Valice (specifically, the “Beyond The Rift” versions I was thinking of making at the time, who eventually became “deadgirlsliekme” and “save_us_alice”) and slapped it in the queue for the 10th! So that’s another Valice(r) Calendar date taken care of, yay.
Valice Multiverse – Just the one ask reply today, about how directions technically change depending on which way you’re facing. XD I get some weird ones over there sometimes – at least this is a fun weird one!
*nods* Not too shabby. And now it is time to head to bed because I am TIRED. Getting to sleep at a decent time has been a bit of a problem lately, and having to have the AC on to sleep comfortably is not helping. *grumbles* At least the heat is supposed to be a little less tomorrow, and finally break over the weekend. Now we just have to hope Hurricane Lee in the Atlantic takes one of the paths that misses us. . .keep your fingers crossed! Night all!
